Julia hadn’t figured out how she would explain any of this to her daughter, once Alice was old enough to understand. She knew she still had time to figure it out, so she avoided thinking about it with any seriousness. After all, what were her options to say to Alice? You technically have a father, but he gave you up? Your father just doesn’t want you in his life? He’s so sick he couldn’t be a parent? Part of the complication was that Julia didn’t understand, even though she was grateful for William’s decision. Alice was a bright-eyed, smiling, chubby-cheeked one-year-old. The sight of her turned strangers on the sidewalk into clowns—they made faces, stuck out their tongues, endeavored to make the toddler giggle. She was, Julia believed, the most wonderful child in the world, with Izzy running a close second. How could anyone not want Alice in their life? The confusion embedded in this question, and in William’s choice, reminded Julia of the swampiness of the end of her marriage. The bottom line, Julia decided, was that she liked herself in New York and wanted to stay longer.
The bittersweet part of that decision, of course, was her sisters. At least once a day, Julia thought she saw Sylvie climbing into a taxi or crossing the street, and there was a woman in Julia’s apartment building whose laughter sounded like Cecelia’s. During every phone call, Julia asked her sisters to visit. “No. Come home,” Cecelia would respond. She was the only one who resisted the idea entirely. Cecelia seemed rooted in Chicago with a stubbornness that was surprising in someone so independent in other ways. Sylvie appeared open to the idea, though she was always vague about timing. And Emeline worried over the details: the cost of visiting, her fear of planes, not having the right shoes. “People will laugh at me there,” she said. “Everyone in Manhattan is so stylish.”
Having made the decision to stay in the city, though, Julia woke up every morning excited. She and Alice started a nightly dance party in their kitchen; the toddler wiggled her butt with great earnestness, to do her part. Mrs. Laven was returning to Manhattan from Miami, but it turned out that she was the head of the building’s co-op board, and she helped Julia rent a cute two-bedroom apartment in the same Upper East Side building. Julia loved having her own place and loved the shape of her days in this new, open-ended calendar. She dropped Alice off at daycare, then commuted on the downtown bus to 42nd Street, where she entered a glass office building that reflected the magnificence of Grand Central Terminal in its windows; on a high floor overlooking the city, she attended meetings with Professor Cooper.
When Emeline announced that she was going to overcome her fears and visit in October, Julia was thrilled. She could barely sleep with excitement, leading up to Emeline’s arrival. Julia hadn’t had time to make friends in New York, but she also had no idea how to do so. Her sisters had always been her best friends; in Chicago, there had never been a need for anyone else in her life. She and Sylvie and the twins knew every version, every age, every mood of one another; Julia couldn’t comprehend how to form an intimate friendship with a stranger. Sometimes she would see a mother at Alice’s daycare whose style she admired or who seemed to have a full-time job, like Julia did, and she considered approaching the woman. But the gulf between her and the total stranger was oceanic, and Julia had no idea how to cross it. Was it possible that a friendship could start from asking someone for their name? Surely they would have to move in together to truly know each other, and that made no practical sense.
Julia took the week off from work so she could spend every minute with Emeline. The two sisters went for long walks, with Julia leading Emeline by the hand across streets, because her sister peered upward at skyscrapers instead of at the cars around her. They spent a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a place they knew from movies and books—and pretended, as they walked through the rooms, that they were in a movie themselves. They stayed up late every night, talking. Julia had been starved for this closeness, starved for easy, silly conversation. She’d been lonely. They discussed Rose—as if their mother were still the sun they orbited—and how haughty she was with all of them from her perch in Florida. Emeline was great with small children, of course, and she sat on the floor playing with Alice for hours.
“You’re the finest Alice in the world,” Emeline said to the little girl. They were playing with blocks on the floor, while Julia sat in the armchair, watching.
“Anemie,” Alice said, with careful concentration. She was trying to say Aunt Emeline.
“Very good!” Emeline clapped.
Alice grinned, showing all her teeth. The little girl had pudgy cheeks, and her hair was straight and golden. Her blue eyes were unmistakably her father’s.
“She does look like William,” Emeline said. “But her eyes twinkle like Daddy’s. And I bet her hair gets curlier as she gets older. In pictures, my hair was straighter when I was a toddler. And at the daycare, I see lots of little kids transform from looking like one parent to looking like the other.”
“I hope she ends up looking at least a tiny bit like me,” Julia said. The two sisters regarded Alice with shared adoration. “But really, as long as she doesn’t have his darkness,” Julia said, speaking her secret fear out loud, “I don’t mind what she looks like.”
Emeline blinked in surprise, but she said, “Of course. You’re right.”
Julia pinned back Emeline’s hair in the mornings, both of them looking at their similar faces in the mirror. I need you, Julia thought, knowing that you meant more than just this one sister, but the need was so great that she couldn’t be picky. She couldn’t let Emeline leave without knowing when and how she would see her again. By the end of Emeline’s first day in New York, Julia had launched a campaign to convince her sister and Josie to move to her city. Transplanting her sister here would be a perfect solution. There were Manhattan daycares that would clamor for women with Emeline and Josie’s work experience, and no one cared if a person was gay here. Julia had discovered, after moving to New York, that Professor Cooper had been living with a man for thirty years. His boyfriend, Donny, was lovely; he wore beautifully tailored suits, and he’d helped Julia pick out rugs—the rug market had turned out to be secretly very expensive and confusing—for her apartment.
“I can’t imagine living anywhere but Chicago,” Emeline said when Julia raised the topic. But she was so admiring of the city, and so happy with Alice in her arms, that Julia felt confident that over the course of a few months she would be able to convince her. She planned to speak to Mrs. Laven about her sister renting an apartment in their building. Julia pictured Alice running back and forth between the two apartments, at home in more than one space. And the prospect of sharing her exciting workdays with Emeline over a glass of wine every evening made Julia shiver with pleasure. It felt like she’d been sipping air through a straw since she left Chicago, and suddenly she was able to take big gulps of oxygen. In Emeline’s presence, she laughed for very little reason and was pleased that Alice threw her little head back and laughed too. Julia thought, I’m better with my sisters.
“How is Sylvie?” she asked. It was Emeline’s last day in the city. Alice was down the hall with Mrs. Laven, so the two sisters could spend a few hours alone together. They were drinking coffee in the kitchen. Emeline had told her all about Cecelia’s art and the Italian jazz musician she was dating. She’d heard about how the two-year-old Izzy had recently discovered a tube of strong glue in Cecelia’s studio and created a skyscraper by gluing together all the canned vegetables and beans she found in their kitchen. But Emeline had barely mentioned Sylvie.